A/N: Okay, so when I got to one part of this chapter, I ran into an issue. There was going to be a flash-back within a flash-back. To solve this issue, I have the "innermost flashback" in bolded font just like this. Hopefully that won't be too confusing…


Chapter Three

Daniel and Sam followed O'Neill to the infirmary sometime after he'd left. Neither of them were sure it was the smartest thing to do but the General had demanded to know what happened on Scartella. That being said, he hadn't necessarily asked them to do it but both of them figured it was better than having someone else do the questioning.

They stopped short of the infirmary door, however, when they heard Jack shouting.

"Get the hell off of me!"

"Colonel, I have to run a blood test," they heard Janet say calmly despite her patient acting up.

"Why again?"

"Every time you come back through the stargate, Colonel. You know that."

"Stick that needle in me, I dare you."

"If you don't calm down I'm going to have to sedate you," Dr. Frasier warned.

At that moment, Daniel decided that bringing in the person that landed Jack there in the first place probably wasn't the best idea. Carter nodded her agreement and remained standing outside as Daniel made his way over to where Jack was sitting upright on a bed.

"How are you feeling?" he asked.

Jack's expression took on one of pure annoyance. "How the hell do you think I'm feeling? Why don't you skip over the stupid questions and ask the one you really want to?"

"What happened in those two hours you were given the tour of that facility on Scartella?"

Though he asked him to question Jack on what he really wanted, O'Neill didn't think he'd actually do it.

"Just a tour, Daniel. We walked around and I was shown a device. Two hours later, I met back up with you guys. Nothing."

"That's bullshit Jack, and you know it."

"Dammit Daniel! Can't you just leave well-enough alone?"

"No, I can't. General Hammond wants to know what happened."

"So he sent you and Carter, who's probably standing outside, to do his biding?"

"Jack—"

"Go away," he said, gesturing toward the door.


"So he's not saying anything," Hammond repeated again.

"No, sir."

He sighed. "Alright, Major. We're going back to Scartella."

"We're?"

"I want to see for myself just what goes on over there."

"Yes sir."


"I find that hard to believe," Hammond said. "He's a completely different man now."

"Be that as it may, I am in serious doubt that it is because of something that happened here."

The woman scientist was lying through her teeth. Hammond could tell and, now that they were seeing her in a different light, Daniel, Sam and Teal'c could tell, too. But with nothing else to go on, they only had her word and nothing more.

"Can I see the device that the Colonel was shown during this tour?" Carter asked. "It may help determine whether or not it was what triggered his aggressive behavior."

Juana seemed to think about it for a moment, probably more for show than anything else, before saying, "The device has been moved to another laboratory a few hundred miles from here."

"Conveniently," Daniel couldn't help but mutter under his breath.

"Ms. Juana, I respect your planet's government and their wishes but I do not intend to leave here today without answers," Hammond continued, "whether the device is at fault or not."

"I'm sorry, but I am not authorized to give you those answers. However, I may be able to get a copy of the machine's blueprints and you can see for yourself what it does. The device may not be here but copies of the blueprints are."

"That would be great."


Three-fourths of SG-1 and General Hammond stared at the blueprints for over an hour, and still nothing had changed.

"It's a CT scan-type machine," Carter said. "And I'm pretty sure it does just exactly what one does, too. At least, that's what it looks like."

"Just by looking at a blueprint?" Daniel commented disbelievingly.

"Yeah, it's not too complicated."

"Then it wasn't the device that's… changed the Colonel?" Hammond asked.

Carter tilted her head as if it would give her a better look at the blueprints in front of her. She shrugged when nothing came. "I'm not sure, to be perfectly honest sir. Aside from design differences and an otherwise unknown true purpose, I still want to call it a MRI machine. But at the same time, if you'll look here where your head's supposed to go," she said, pointing to a section on the blueprint, "it appears that in their version, your head is encased in some liquid of some sort… a gel, maybe? I can't tell from here."

She reached across the table they were huddled around and pulled one sheet over the rest. It was a paper full notes that had been declassified to them some hours earlier.

"But this gel," she said, pointing to something that didn't make sense to any of the men. "You can stick tubes through it so you can breathe, obviously, but from what I can tell, it does something to your head, messes with your mind."

"Why would they do that if it really is just their version of a CT-scan machine?" Daniel asked.

"Honestly, I have no idea. I'm no medical doctor. But if it does screw with your brain, then it's possible they did do something to him, sir."

"Alright, we'll bring these notes with us back to Earth and hope that Dr. Frasier can make heads or tales out of it."


"What happened?" General Hammond asked.

He had decided to accompany the remaining members of SG-1 to the infirmary so he'd be there when Dr. Frasier first saw the blueprints only to find Jack fully sedated.

SG-1 found themselves drawn to the Colonel's bed while Hammond received the explanation.

"We did a fully physical, which he didn't much like," Janet told him. "His blood-work showed the norm for intoxication but there was also a small amount of a substance I couldn't identify in it."

"That'd probably be whatever's in that machine," Sam said.

"What machine?"

"After, Doctor, please continue."

"When I came back in to inform him of the results, an assistant of mine informed me that he was now exhibiting the classical signs of depression. I didn't believe it for myself until I got in there. That was two hours ago."

"Then why did you sedate him?" Daniel asked.

"When we asked what was wrong, he lashed out and got violent to the point where sedation was necessary. But that's not what worries me."

"What's the matter now?"

"We did a few scans and… whatever happened to him on that planet, it's going to cause him to fall into a coma sometime soon. Whether or not I can bring him out of it, I won't be able to tell until it happens. Two weeks ago, he was showing no other symptoms except for irritability. I'm sorry I didn't catch it earlier, sir."


Daniel nodded. "You're going to have to tell us sooner or later, Jack."

"It's… it's nothing I feel like talking about."

"Sam was able to get Juana to give her and Dr. Frasier blueprints of the machine they showed you," he told him. "They're not completely sure yet what it does, but something tells me that you do."

"Unfortunately," he said, looking down at the bed he was in. "Look, all that matters here is that they're not who they say they are."

"How so?"

"Let's just leave it at this: they don't deal with and correct their criminals the same way we do."

"What do you mean?"

"That machine messes with your head, makes you see things that aren't there, hear things that don't exist- not anymore, at least. Like some screwed up correction or reform program."

"In what way?"

"It makes you hallucinate, I don't know!"

"Okay, okay, relax."

One of Jack's fists balled and then opened again with his growing frustration.

"Why did you let them test it out on you?" Daniel asked.

"I didn't let them do anything."

"Then what happened?"

"You know, I'm not a science type person…. You should probably call Carter over here and have her take a look at it."

"You'll be fine, Colonel O'Neill. It's just a peek. I doubt you're Carter would have been able to fully understand the device anyway," Tristan Drena, a Scartellan scientist, told Jack. "Just come have a quick look."

Jack sighed. He was beginning to get bored of this 'tour'. Why did they pick him for a science department look-around? Did he really look like a scientist to these people? They really must have nothing at all.

"Alright, just make it quick," he resigned.

Where were Daniel, Carter and Teal'c, anyway? It must have been close to hitting the two-hour mark. It had to be, if only for Jack's sanity.

That's when it hit him. A wave of fatigue he couldn't fight off engulfed him and when he woke up…

No.

The thought ran through his head at a million miles a second, repeating over and over again in time with his suddenly increased pulse rate. His throat clenched up. He found he couldn't move.

He was staring at he and Sarah's bedroom, his son on the floor with blood pooling around them.

The sound of a gunshot rang through ears, kick-starting the full memory of the one event that, even if he desperately wanted to, he could never forget.

The night Charlie accidentally shot himself with Jack's gun.

Daniel sat in shocked silence as Jack recounted the story of what happened. He couldn't decide what scared him more, though: the event that he was forced to somehow relive in vivid detail or the monotone voice in which Jack recited the story.

"Don't think about it, Daniel," Jack told him. "Seriously, just don't."

He swallowed his questions and asked Jack what happened next.

Jack ran to his dead child, checking for a pulse. He begged Charlie to move, to breathe, to do anything other than lay there in that dark red pool of blood.

He fought the despaired tears back as long as they could but the profound sense of loss, the rip in his heart, was too great and he began to cry.

It was then that Sarah made it up the stairs. Jack had left her behind in the wake of his desperate sprint from outside of the house to their bedroom to find out just what had happened. She stood in the doorway for a second, until Jack looked up at her with tear-filled eyes to confirm that the sight before her was actually reality.

"No," she said simply. "No."

Jack couldn't speak, couldn't say a word.

"My baby!" she shrieked. "No!"

She ran over to him and nearly yanked Charlie out of his father's arms. "No, no, no, you'll be okay," she kept repeating over and over again. Until, that is, it clicked in her head what had happened.

Her gaze snapped up at Jack's face and it grew hard with hate. "It's your fault. It's all your fault!"

"Sarah, no—"

"It's your gun, Jack!" she shouted, standing up now. "Your gun! You should have kept it up someplace higher or not here at all!"

Her angry, desperate tirade dribbled off into coherent words as sobs took the spots where sentences should have been. Jack stood up to grab her and hold her to him, to attempt to comfort the mother of a dead child. Her face was pressed against his now blood-stained shirt and she kept crying and shouting…

so much crying.

"We stood like that for a while," Jack said, though it was more of a whisper now. "I never wanted to see that again. I'm gonna kill those damn bastards for making me relive it. I'm not some damn criminal! And to punish them that way- especially if they're innocent! Daniel, that's messed up, it's-" Jack's eyes rolled back into his head before shutting.

"Jack… Jack? Jack! Colonel!"

Daniel's voice rose, growing more worried every time he had to say Jack's name to get him to respond. Monitors and machines started beeping chaotically then, and Frasier and her medical team came flying in.

That was when Jack fell into the predicted coma.


"How is he?" Carter asked as Daniel made his way into the briefing room.

"Still in a coma," he answered, sliding heavily, sluggishly, into a chair. "Do you know why the General called us all here?"

"There was an unscheduled off-world activation about twenty minutes ago," Carter said.

"I believe it may be the Scartellans," Teal'c offered.

"Great," Daniel said. They were the last people he wanted to see at the moment.

Just then General Hammond and two others appeared from the General's office. One was Juana and the other was a scientist none of the team had seen before.

"They're here to cure Colonel O'Neill."

"Why now?" Daniel asked angrily. "Why not two days ago before the coma set in?"

"It took us that long to convince our governments that such action would be prudent. But when the General here threatened to end all relationships with our planet, they agreed."

"Oh, well, I'm glad that trade is what's going to get Jack out of this."

"I am sorry that this has happened," Juana said.


"Yeah."

"Jack?"

It was Daniel's voice. That was the first thing that registered as his eyes began to open and he became conscious to the world again.

"How are you feeling?"

"Ungh."

Daniel chuckled. "I guess that's a good sign. Let me get Dr. Frasier over here."

When Daniel left, Jack tried sitting up but found it more laborious than it should have been and let himself fall backwards.

Why did he hurt so much? Why did he suddenly have such a large headache?

The questions stopped when he realized he could overhear Daniel talking with a few others.

"So he's awake?" one asked.

"Yeah, he just woke up." That one was Daniel.

"Thank God." He thought that was Carter's.

"Indeed." Jack tried laughing but found himself caught up in a coughing fit instead.

"Colonel! It's great to see you alive and well again," Dr. Frasier said as she came over to his bed.

"I think I beg to differ."

"What hurts?"

"A lot. Headache."

"I'll get you something for that."

"Am I gonna be okay?"

Dr. Frasier smiled. "Yes, you're going to be just fine."


2 Days Later…

"You don't remember anything?" Carter asked him. "At all?"

SG-1 was now clustered at a small table in the mess-hall after Jack had been released from the infirmary.

"Nope," he said, eating a spoonful of blue jello. "Nuthin'. Should I?"

Carter and Daniel shared a quick glance with each other and then Teal'c before Daniel said, "Nope. Just another routine visit."

They'd tell him in a day or so, after things had fully gone back to normal.

"Then how'd I end up in a coma?"

Daniel smiled. "Too much Abydonian moonshine."

Jack, gesturing with his spoon in hand, replied, "See, now that's the stuff."

END